413 Quotes by Samuel Butler

Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing.

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism – better dead than dying.

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

I do not greatly care whether I have been right or wrong on any point, but I care a good deal about knowing which of the two I have been.